I was at two Trade Shows recently, the Joint MDM, PacWest, PlastTech etc show at the Anaheim Convention Center and the Landscape Show at the Long Beach Convention Center. I observed plenty of Sales Folks busy on their Smart Phones, and talking with each other and vacant booths……

I spent about 4 hours at each show, and only one person actually approached me. Yes, one and only one out of a thousand, Kudos to the gentileman from Safari Circuits Inc of Ostego Michigan. He struck up a conversation and qualified me well actually disqualified me. A forgettable few more scanned my badge. I am sure they intend to follow up but: According to the folks at Sandler Sales Institute by their estimate 90% of Trade Show Leads NEVER get ANY Follow up……and those precious few that do are simply get a piece of literature or spammed with an e-mail. One guess what the success rate of that is…..

My best guess is it costs a minimum of $3,000 to $5,000 to run a decent looking 10 x 10 booth with 2 salespeople. I don’t know why others run booths my goal was to get leads and convert those leads to paying customers. How did I know my ROI ? Well as a Product Manager, I tracked it and followed up on the leads personally, using an Excel Spread Sheet. It took a lot of work. Now with Cloud Based Programs like Salesforce the leads can be uploaded, assigned and tracked quickly and easily.

If a show or a sales team isn’t cutting it would you like to find out sooner or after sales crater? I don’t suppose any of this applies to my followers on the off chance it does, let’s talk.

Related posts at: http://philsallaway.wordpress.com and http://www.linkedin.com/in/productmanagercalifornia/